


Healer's Art

by KennaM



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Children, Gen, Serious Injuries, Skyhold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 22:30:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5066998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KennaM/pseuds/KennaM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sits alone outside the infirmary door, too young to be let inside, waiting for news that can't be good. He hears her pain, touches it, and takes it away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Healer's Art

They wouldn’t let her inside the infirmary, so she waited outside on the grass, alone. She sat and watched the clouds pass by overhead, or the guards walk the battlements, before boredom took her and she turned her attention to the debris on the ground. A broken stick became her knight; a crawling beetle, her scout. She built a castle out of fallen leaves and twigs. A passing wind knocked it down.

The beetle crawled away, and she started drawing in the dirt instead.

“He’s not going to be alright,” a voice said. She dropped her stick in fright, and stared up. Even hunched as he was, the boy seemed tall to her, almost a man but not one of the adults she recognized. His wide hat brim covered his shoulders and shadowed his face, but she could see his eyes, light and sad. He dropped to his knees beside her, and she drew up her legs protectively.

“The bone doesn’t fit the way it’s supposed to,” he continued, “the way it should. Not anymore.”

That was more than they’d told her and less than she’d already figured out. Four men had been brought in that morning on a wagon, her father only one of them. Wounded at the patrol camp just a day’s ride down the mountain, fighting off bandits, presumably. The patrol camps had mage healers but they’d been brought back to Skyhold anyways, taken directly to the infirmary by the more experienced physicians without even a notice to the men’s wives. She’d left her friends to follow the doctors, to see what was wrong, but she was too young. They wouldn’t speak to her.

“Papa?” she asked the boy, though she already knew the answer. Not alright. The empty dread in her chest was filling up now, tight and painful. Mama had spent too many nights already crying herself to sleep.

“ _He isn’t going to die_ ,” the boy said. His voice was so earnest, almost pleading, like he needed her to know that it was true, and she knew that it was. Her fists, balled tight around the fabric of her skirts, loosened.

“I don’t want Papa to die,” she said. She picked at a tuft of grass.

“Everyone dies eventually,” the boy said.

She frowned. Tears that had been forgotten threatened to return, and she could think of no reason to stop them. “ _No_ ,” she said, and worked her knuckles into the dirt because she didn’t know how else to make her words stay. “ _I don’t want him to die._ ”

The boy seemed to consider that for a moment. “He doesn’t want to die either,” he finally said. “So he won’t.”

That sounded like her Papa. She didn’t remember their village well, but sometimes when the nights were too quiet, Mama would tell her stories. How he was only a guardsman when the civil war broke out, but got the three of them and the rest of their village to safety because he wouldn’t let the mass panic tear them apart. How he fought demons after the sky opened and joined the Inquisition to make sure no more attacked his family. If he didn’t want death to take him, he wouldn’t let that happen, either.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “I thought knowing would help, but… the hurt is still there.”

She didn’t have a response to that. “Why wouldn’t they tell me?” she asked instead, and pointed towards the infirmary door. The boy looked up at it as well, then across at her.

“Because-” he started, then stopped, as if something else had cut him off. He was silent for a moment, and she waited. “The castle is lit by fire and the Breach,” he said, his voice light as air. “In the courtyard he watches a man and a girl dance together. There’s no music he can hear, but the girl is laughing, music enough. She sits high on the man’s shoulders, above it all. He laughs too. But the man will likely never dance again. He has to try. There’s nothing he can do, but he has to try. The nights are already dark enough.”

The boy almost looked exhausted when he finished speaking. She watched his eyes close, saw him take in a ragged breath, and considered what he’d said.

“In the story,” she asked, “am I the girl?”

“Yes.”

“You saw us playing?”

“I saw it in him. The physician. He recognized you.”

She picked at another tuft of grass in the dirt. The healer’s tents were right by the courtyard, where she and her Papa always played, when he wasn’t away. She hadn’t thought anyone watched.

“Papa won’t be able to play with me anymore?” she asked.

Nights were the only time her Mama or Papa could play. During the day the adults were always so busy, talking or planning or working. Her Mama spent her days up in the rookery, and when Papa was in Skyhold he was always with the troops, training. The children had the run of the castle during the day, largely forgotten when they weren’t getting underfoot. But at night her Mama always found her, too tired to carry her on her shoulders but never too tired to lift her onto Papa’s.

“No,” the boy said. “He’ll survive, but he won’t be alright. I thought you should know.”

Slowly, she stood up. The boy watched as she brushed the dirt off her skirts and swept messy hair out of her face. Like this, she was just a few inches taller than him. “Will you play with me?” she asked, and held a hand out invitingly. The boy stared at it.

“I don’t know how to dance,” he answered.

“Please?” she said. The tight feeling in her chest was gone, but the infirmary door was still closed and her friends had disappeared off to a new game, and if the boy left too she might not be able to breathe. “We can play a different game.”

There wasn’t any room on his shoulders anyway, narrow as they were, and covered by the hat that now masked his eyes from view.

The boy stood up as well, awkwardly rearranging his limbs until he was back on his feet, his hands lightly holding onto each other. She could see now that he was staring at the ground. At her lazy, half-smeared drawings in the dirt.

“OK,” he said, and offered one of his own hands to hers. It hung, inches from her own, like he wanted to take her hand but physically couldn’t.

She grabbed his instead. “Come on,” she said, and started walking, leading him away from the quiet corner where she had been hiding, waiting for news. He followed obediently. “Let’s go play by the horses. They always like it when you feed them behind the quartermaster’s back.”

When her Mama found her that night, the infirmary door had finally been opened and the physician led both of them inside to the bed where her Papa was sleeping. “He’ll live,” the man said, his voice a tone of comfort, “but he won’t be able to fight anymore.”

“We can’t play together anymore,” she said. She no longer felt the need to cry. “My friend told me. He’ll play with me instead.”

“Which friend?” her Mama asked. She felt her Mama’s hand on her shoulder, a light squeeze.

“I… forget,” she said. “A new friend. He didn’t tell me his name but he promised Papa wouldn’t die. I think he’s imaginary.”


End file.
